Rice struggles for victories beyond Libya

Sue Pleming brThe Bush administration touts its new relationship with Libya as a foreign policy success but elsewhere from North Korea to Iran, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice faces bad news.brRice jets into Libya on Friday from Lisbon for a meeting with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, the first visit of a U.S. Secretary of State to Tripoli since 1953 and what the top U.S. diplomat puts in the positive column of her legacy.brWith four months left before President George W. Bush leaves office in January, 2009, Rice has many open files on her desk, with prospects of success narrowing before Republican Sen. John McCain or Democratic Sen. Barack Obama is in the White House.brShe is trying to wrap up a Palestinian statehood deal by the end of the year, North Korean nuclear talks have hit new roadblocks as has a civilian nuclear agreement with India and Iran still refuses to give up its atomic program.brRice tells reporters repeatedly she will sprint to the finish and there is still time to achieve many of her foreign policy goals and get a legacy for the president that goes beyond the unpopular Iraq war.brWhile others were on vacation in July and August, Rice was on the road nearly every week, meeting the North Koreans in Singapore, jetting to Georgia over the crisis with Russia, stopping in on Baghdad and visiting Israel and the Palestinian Territories to push along an elusive peace agreement.brBut several analysts say Rice's efforts are too little, too late and all eyes are on the next White House.brShe is right to convey an optimistic scenario but one of the problems is credibility. At this point in time people stop paying attention and look to the next team coming in, said Edward Walker, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt.brHe pointed to U.S. President Bill Clinton, who pushed until the last few days of his term to get a deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians. His efforts ended in failure.brRice is still optimistic of a deal before the end of the year, a goal set at a peace conference launching the new peace process in the U.S. naval town Annapolis, last November.brBut events on the ground are not positive -- embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert may have only a few weeks left in office and the Palestinian Territories are divided between Hamas-run Gaza and the West Bank, which is ruled by pro-Western President Mahmoud Abbas.brLibya gave up its weapons of mass destruction program in 2003, resulting in U.S. sanctions being lifted and Tripoli coming off the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.brState Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Libya was an example of how the Bush administration's non-proliferation policy had worked, a point underlined by some experts who said Rice should have used the same tactics of engagement with foes such as Iran to get them to give up their nuclear programs.brUnlike its posture to North Korea, Iran or even Syria, the Bush administration was from the beginning willing to talk to the Libyans, said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst now with the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution.brThe defining point about Libya is that a policy of engagement which they inherited from Clinton was successful, he added.brRice, a Soviet expert, is also closing up her eight years as national security advisor in the first Bush term and top U.S. diplomat for his second, with relations in tatters with Russia following its brief war with Georgia. br While the security situation is improving in Iraq, experts say it is fragile and they point to the worsening crises in both Afghanistan, where U.S. troop deaths are rising, and the political turmoil in close U.S. ally Pakistan.brThe plan to spread democracy across the Middle East has also had little success, with outstanding human rights concerns in Libya as an example of how that has not worked.brThe reason Gaddafi gave up a WMD program was because we (the United States) invaded Iraq and he was afraid he would be next. But that is not enough, said Danielle Pletka of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.brOne of the most egregious cases, she said, was the ongoing detention of ailing political dissident Fathi al-Jahmi, who was being held in a Tripoli medical centre.brI don't know how they can notch up that as a success story, she added. brbr — Reuters